harding pykewater challenge

Space: A Political Frontier In February 2020, shortly before the coming coronavirus lockdown brought my job-hunt to an abrupt end, I took part in a group discussion, in the final application stage for a civil service position. The discussion touched on four set topics: I forget the first, but the second was on mandatory military service, and the third on a four-day workweek. The answers of the other candidates were predictable: no to military service, and apparently they wanted everyone to work the full five days. But it was the discussion on the fourth topic, one of a more philosophical significance, that I found most depressing.

Their answer to the question: ‘Should we stop funding space exploration?’ was a resounding yes – again, for reasons that were quite predictable. Why should governments devote enormous sums of money to some unnecessary and egotistical quest into the Unknown, when the problems of ordinary people were so extensive and severe? There were hospitals and schools to build, underrepresented and marginalised groups to represent and include; there was poverty to reduce and cancer to cure.

One candidate even suggested that space exploration seemed like an example of Toxic Masculinity – as if man’s insatiable urge for conquest, exhausted on a planet already marked out by the boundaries of nation states, now needed some interstellar outlet.

I tried at first to hint at how space exploration might have some deeper meaning, beyond the material concerns of the here and now – that by moving humanity outside the confines of our earthly atmosphere, we might achieve something of true significance – but this was not the venue, nor the audience. Finally I resorted to the materialist logic of our age: the economic argument. By bringing together cross-disciplinary expertise and working on a single goal (such as, for example, putting a man on the moon), organisations like NASA achieved great leaps in science and technology, made possible by the co-ordinating power of the public sector. The proliferation of these new technologies spurred the creation of whole new industries, with new supply chains, new manufacturing centres, and new jobs. There would be profits and consumption and tax revenues, prosperity and innovation and growth. And that talismanic noun with its strange and occult power to move minds and alter attitudes worked its magic, and the other candidates came round to the idea that perhaps, space exploration wasn’t such a waste of time after all.

But that is not the argument I want to make.

I believe that space is a political frontier: but I take politics to mean something more than the greatest good for the greatest number. Humanity has always organised around principles with a deeper significance: a purpose beyond the merely material, a sense of self oriented towards some higher reality. We are driven not just by the acquisition of ever-larger amounts of wealth; we do not live by bread alone; we need something not just to live for, but to die for. We are the species that searches out the deepest oceans and the highest mountain-tops, just because they are there. Even the most ardently atheist regimes of the Socialist century paid homage to a Marxist materialism that was more than just the improvement of everyday life: the Communist future that beckoned would allow humanity to overcome itself – hence the focus on science, and on space, the pomp and the splendour and the quasi-religious ceremony, the veneration of leaders and revolutionary heroes: this was a battle for History.

When comparing the diets, health, lifestyles, and, indeed, the happiness of hunter-gatherer societies and their immediate agricultural descendants, anthropologists and archaeologists are often struck by how much better off these early humans were. True, infant mortality was high, but for those who made it into adulthood lifespans often exceeded that of modern humans. Their social organisations were remarkably egalitarian, and they lived with a freedom unimpeded by borders and walls. By contrast, agricultural societies were (and are) hierarchical, authoritarian, and oppressive. Ruled over

by unchallenged God-Kings, who maintained their position through human sacrifice and institutionalised slavery, they were irrevocably unequal and, it seems, profoundly unpleasant for a majority of the population – particularly women. Competition with other societies, along with the structural violence necessary for the maintenance of autocratic power, introduced levels of brutality that were previously unknown. It is in this period that human remains first begin showing signs of tooth decay, owing to a starch-heavy diet, as well as a shorter stature. It seems that the agricultural revolution made our lives nasty, brutish, and short.

After 10,000 years of history, with its empires and its wars: the centuries of genocide and invasion, conquest and enslavement, intrigues and assassinations, when we look back on the slave trades and absolute monarchies, the pogroms and famines – the sheer suffering of the human story, and even the modern world (born from the destructive energies unleashed by two world wars), despite the pleasures and prosperity that come from the political achievements of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law, the great engine of capitalism bringing goods to every door, has set ticking an ecological time-bomb: the triple threat of climate change, agricultural devastation, and the degradation of the oceans, with overfishing, acidification, and plastic pollution, not to mention the threat of nuclear annihilation, or the animal welfare catastrophe, with 50 billion sentient creatures each year forced to live lives of unimaginable agony on factory farms, when we see the anomie and apathy of human existence, divorced from meaning, existing only to consume, then die, it is tempting to conclude that civilisation has been the most monumental mistake.

And yet.

There is another story here, beyond the mundane, above all other human endeavour, aside from industry and Art. This is the story of Science.

That upright apes, equipped only with a lowered larynx, an increased cranial cavity, and opposable thumbs, could walk out of Africa and move across the whole globe, and in the space of a few thousand years, a microsecond in the evolutionary timeline, gain an understanding of the world that allowed them to leave the earth itself, seems to me the most important, the most profound development in time and space: we are physical beings, yet with our creative intelligence, and our consciousness, we can know reality – through our eyes, the universe begins to see itself.

And so despite the suffering and the destruction of human history, we find a story of transcendent significance, a universal becoming that moves ever closer to some extraordinary future, a humanity that overcomes its limitations and begins to actively control its surroundings.

We stand on the threshold of a new stage of evolution, and space exploration, the extension of our species out into the solar system, even beyond, is the political frontier. We are confronted by a chaotic, possibly irrational, even incomprehensible reality, and yet through a slow, laborious, even tortuous process of trial and error, theorisation and experimentation, punctuated by moments of genius, of insight that seems almost like divine inspiration, despite dead-ends and dogmatism, we move inexorably onwards.

To judge our species by pain and pleasure is to reach a damning verdict: we have failed, utterly. But by the standards of scientific knowledge, and technological achievement, we have realised the most astonishing success. Space exploration, as a vivid demonstration of the intelligent power of humankind, is our most meaningful endeavour.

Coda I didn’t get the job.